when is a hard drive not a hard drive, and other irish riddles...

hello and thanks to all who offered advice on an earlier thread!

i had trouble logging on to this site to post back earlier.

my system:

compaq presario 5014UK.
AMD Duron 900MHz. 128MB SDRAM. 40GB HD (quantum fireball) C:/ and D:/.
8*CD-RW.
Windows ME.

the history:

i bought my computer august 2001. windows ME came preinstalled on it. i didn't get CDs. ME hung often, daily from the moment i hooked it up. (i didn't know how to respond
to error messages. now-a-days i have a hand written log book).

a problem with the graphics occurred after six months. the correct graphics card driver was located on the net (S2 proSavage)but didn't fix the problem.

the O/S was replaced by Windows 2000 and a third partition G:/ was put on as back-up for the system files on D:/
i had no further problems with hanging. then a month ago the computer crashed and after a necessary cold boot took over one hour to load and took minutes to respond to moouse stroke.

a qualified technican where i work saved my files and reformatted the HDD and tried to reinstall win 2000 but the process was happening so slowly that he aborted the attempt and diagnosed a failed hard disk drive.

since i had an insurance plan i sent the computer to the shop i bought it in for repair/ replacement. the emergency boot disk did not do the job. the store said that the BIOS had become corrupted. the original CDs from compaq had to be gotten. the computer is now back running ME on its original configuration. it has been hanging and giving error messages since.(setup32, iexplore, errors saving to floppy due to file permission error, can't install my printer from the CD, get blue-screen error). it is interrupting my work to an unacceptable level. i had no such problems with win 2k!!

scandisk found no erors on c:/ drive. (i did once get an error previously when running ME and automatically fixed by scandisk)

i am not confident about installing stuff myself. 'my' technican said he won't try to install windows 2000 on the grounds of his belief that the HDD is failing.

if the hard disk is about to fail how can i detect this so that i can then go about replacing it? the shop said they detected no hardware fault.

the shop haven't been very informative: all they will tell me is they don't deal with software problems but that if i change my O/S again it'll be my responsibility. the repair guy told me that he doesn't know what happened to crash my computer, that there are no guarantees as computers are 'not an exact science'.

a very strange and irritating thing to be saying to someone who was sold insurance by the same shop!! is this just an irish phenomenon...?!

scandisk does not detect any errors on my drive.

i wonder why did the computer not boot from the emergency boot disk? i have read posts on computing.net re: a possible issue about reformatting re: BIOS stored on a hidden partition.

i have e-mailed compaq with these questions and hope (!) that they will give me some straight-up info. the computer keeps crashing when trying to download from compaq support upgrade info.

i have asked compaq if is it possible to uninstall selectively win ME and install 2000 on this model without too much trouble, are there issues with changing the software since the hardware may be configured for ME?? i absolutely need a stable O/S for my work.

(another issue is that i want to install a zip drive that i have 'inherited'. though one thing at a time!)

i hope i have been clear on the issues.

i hate ME and want 2000 on my system.

could my HDD be about to fail?

i would appreciate any comments thoughts or advice. thanking you in advance,

xstal.

hello
you find out what make of hard drive you have and get the makers hard drive diagnostics utilie. to find out what hard drive you have. goto www.belrac.com and d/l belarc advisor.
to see if you do have a bios virus d/l fport for dos anti virus and run it. it finds a few of these.

One thing is I would add some more ram! It's fairly cheap for that machine right now. I bet it takes pc133.

Anyhow A friend of mine has pretty much the same computer except for more ram. He hated ME also so I just got a windows 98 boot disk and formated his hard drive erasing all the compaq crap then did a clean install of windows XP Pro. He can never use the restore disk any more but who'd want me back. It's been over a year and he hasn't had any problems that requried anything more than restore to previous points. If it's draggin really slow you might have a bad alocation table on your hard drive, sometimes scandisk doesn't reveal these. If you format the hard drive and have this problem sometimes you can fdisk the drive and make your primary partition smaller and still use the drive.

xrystal;
Though I tend to agree somewhat with the earlier posts, it is possible, considering the diagnostics you and others have ran, that you may be suffering from an onboard cache problem (built-in to the CPU) It's a hard one to find but one way of testing it is to disable your cache in BIOS settings. If your problems cease to exist, then you know that is the prob. Do know that in doing this, ur PC will boot much slower than norm. but it's worth a try! Good Luck! E-mail if you have questions! There is nothing wrong with WinME you just have to tweak it a little!

xrystal;
Sorry, I meant the CMOS settings!